And the saints we see, are all made of gold [ Malis]

[Malis]

"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

She can feel his eyes where they settle on the swollenness of her large, pregnant belly. It makes her a little uncomfortable at first and so she shifts from foot to foot, her eyes wide and luminous and bright with wariness where they dance across his dark face. For a moment she thinks she would like to know his thoughts, would like to see what puzzle pieces her was putting together of a pregnant mare with jagged, gruesome wounds, smelling of a goat-beast he seemed to know somehow. Whatever it was she was certain he would be wrong. How would he ever guess that some of these wounds were months and months old, that Pollock had split her open so wide even now she struggled to finish healing. It had been faster before, faster before he had raped her and filled her belly with child. But her ability seemed stretched thin between the two bodies it looked after. Cuts and scrapes repaired almost immediately, surface wounds were nothing. But the bleeding valleys he had carved out of the topography of her flesh were something entirely else.

As the rain begins to fall around them, the fat droplets sizzling where they turned to steam against the heat of his roiling body, she can see him trying to process her words. There is a smile that slips across her lips then, and though it is without humor, she laughs. He must think her a madwoman, and perhaps now she is. But she slips quietly closer to him, pausing once she is close enough to feel the heat coming in waves off of his red and dark stone-flesh. He smells strange and acrid but she holds her mouth so close to his neck until her skin is pink and protesting against the uncomfortable heat. Only then just she pull back- but just a single step. For now though she ignores his confusion, abandoning it instead for the way her heart throbs in her chest when he mentions home.

“The last time I saw her, everything had burned. The trees didn’t smell like pine. They reeked of rot and death and ash.” She is thoughtful in her reminiscence, though there is one memory she has barred off completely and when her mind starts to slip that way she stiffens and returns to Killdare abruptly. Her face softens when she catches his eyes. There is something earnest in him, something buried beneath too much weight and baggage and responsibility. But she thinks she can see it there anyway and it settles her like little else has been able to. “And what makes you think the Chamber will let you change her to something aside from the dark? She who demands a blood debt from my father, she who demanded the heart of my grandfather? The heart that still beats beneath the dirt below her citizen’s feet.” Her eyes glitter up at him fiercely but she smiles, a thin, sad slash against the blue and it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “You must think yourself very special.” She says and there is nothing cruel about the way she says it because against all logic, she believes it too. This one is different.

But then she remembers his earlier confusion and her emerald eyes slip from where they had been holding his matching gaze.

“I mean, I think I died.” She says again, and that strange smile spun from sickness and sadness slips from the blue of her delicate mouth. “Whatever I am now is not what I was.” She says firmly, her eyes as bright and heavy as emeralds sunk into the black band of fur around her brow. “I am not magic, and neither is this. But whatever it is, it is wrong like magic.” Her jaw stiffens and she turns from him abruptly to peer out into the rain until she has reined in the roiling emotions churning tumultuous over her face. When she turns back to look at him she is like stone and steel, her gaze sharp where it carves truths from him. “I don’t control it, it controls me.” She slips closer again until her nose is mere inches from his smoldering nose, and there is challenge gleaming in her strange, broken face. “It’s easier just to show you,” a pause and she doesn’t pull away from the heat that builds in the empty space between them, “touch me, Killdare. Let me show you what I am.”

MALIS

makai x oksana

texture © hexe78

stop you give me so much muse <3